Acquiring a clean speech signal is of considerable interest in numerous two-way communication application ns using a variety of head-wearable hearing devices such as headsets, active hearing protectors and hearing instruments or aids. The clean speech signal supplies a far end recipient, receiving the clean speech signal through a wireless data communication link, with a more intelligible and comfortably sounding speech signal. The clean speech signal typically provides improved speech intelligibly and better comfort for the far-end recipient e.g. during a phone conversation.
However, sound environments in which the user of the head-wearable hearing device is situated are often corrupted or infected by numerous noise sources such as interfering speakers, traffic, loud music, machinery etc. leading to a poor signal-to-noise ratio of a target sound signal arriving at an ambient microphone of the hearing device. This ambient microphone may be sensitive to sound arriving at all directions from the user's sound environment and hence tends to indiscriminately pick-up all ambient sounds and transmit these as a noise-infected speech signal to the far end recipient. While these environmental noise problems may be mitigated to a certain extent by using an ambient microphone with certain directional properties or using a so-called boom-microphone (typical for headsets), there is a need in the art to provide head-wearable hearing device with improved signal quality, in particular improved signal-to-noise ratio, of the user's own voice as transmitted to far-end recipients over the wireless data communication link. The latter may comprise a Bluetooth link or network, W-Fi link or network, GSM cellular link etc.
The present head-wearable hearing device detects and exploits a bone conducted component of the user's own voice picked-up in the user's ear canal to provide a hybrid speech/voice signal with improved signal-to-noise ratio under certain sound environmental conditions for transmission to the far end recipient. The hybrid speech signal may in addition to the bone conducted component of the user's own voice also comprise a component/contribution of the user's own voice as picked-up by an ambient microphone arrangement of the head-wearable hearing device. This additional voice component derived from the ambient microphone arrangement may comprise a high frequency component of the user's own voice to at least partly restore the original spectrum of the user's voice in the hybrid microphone signal.